The 1990s were the heroin years – and even if you never touched the stuff, it was all around.

I was a student in Melbourne during those years. This was before all the money was sloshing around – before laneway bars and pop-up restaurants. Melbourne felt different then. The economy was crawling, it always seemed to be cold, the city was a sort of badlands of shops up for lease, foreclosures, dirty awesome live music venues, old-man pubs, low-hanging skies.

People in Sydney called it Bleak City. And heroin was part of it – it gave Melbourne its minor key. The winter wind would barrel up Bourke Street and the only person that seemed warm would be the young man in a T-shirt, mouth slack and on the nod, on the 97 tram.

“Winter was a bad time in that town,” Helen Garner wrote of Melbourne in Postcard from Surfers. “Streets got longer and greyer, and it was simply not possible to manage without some sort of warmth.”

Heroin was on the streets; it was in the lounge rooms of the unheated share houses, it was in the laneways, in the city, in Richmond, in Box Hill, in Footscray, in St Kilda. It was in the amusement arcades around Burke and Russell Streets; it was at Flinders Street McDonald’s and across the road in the courtyard of St Paul’s cathedral. It was the beggars asking you for $7 because that’s how much a cap cost.

It was on the front page of the Age and Herald Sun. It was in the cinema with Trainspotting. It was in the songs – the Dandy Warhols, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Blur, Alice in Chains, Elastica, Nirvana.

It ran through the music scene and into books. It was Kate Holden’s Under my Skin, Helen Garner’s true crime book, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, Andrew McGahan’s Praise, Luke Davies Candy (“When you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t … ”), Robin Klein’s I Came Back to Show You I could Fly, John Birmingham’s He Died with a Falafel in His Hand.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation, set within the milieu of the Australian National University in Canberra in the 1990s, seems like an aberration now: middle-class people – law students – casually taking and buying heroin like it was weed.

Every generation has its drug. Every generation has its moral panic. Right now it’s ice, although ecstasy is hot on its heels this year with young people dying at music festivals. In the 1990s, it was heroin.

Matt Noffs, of the Noffs Foundation, told Guardian Australia: “After the 1990s, heroin got replaced by cocaine, which was very expensive, then speed – which was cheaper – and then it got replaced by meth in 2006. Meth use has been steady since around 2006, although it’s on the wane now. In a way that is the new heroin.”

Heroin is back in the news though the reporting is more muted. Thirteen people – mostly middle-aged – died from heroin overdoses within the space of a month in Sydney, and the coroner issued a warning that a bad batch might be doing the rounds.

The deaths all occurred within the Sydney metropolitan area, and the coroner listed the deaths by age and suburb – there was the 53-year-old woman who died in the northern beaches suburb of Dee Why on 2 June, the 41-year-old man who died on 30 May in Potts Point, the 41-year-old man who died in the north shore suburb of Willoughby on 2 May, the 44-year-old woman who died in Lane Cove North on 18 May.

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We don’t know if these people fit the profile of an older heroin user as described by Professors Shane Darke and Michael Farrell of the National Drug & Alcohol Research Centre at the University of NSW: in and out of jail, impoverished, the addiction that just keeps on hanging on over the decades.

What we do know is, those dying of heroin overdoses in Australia tend to be older.

A profile of Australia’s illegal drug market by the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission found “there are indications that the demand for heroin is declining as the established user group is ageing and the uptake of the drug by younger users is not increasing, perhaps due to negative perceptions of heroin injection. To date there is no indication that other forms of ingesting the drug (for example, smoking and inhaling) have been embraced by the youth market”.

A report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) in 2010 also highlights heroin’s ageing population: “Since 2006, there has been a shift towards older clients receiving treatment, with the proportion of clients aged 30 years and over rising from 72% to 82% and the proportion of clients aged under 30 falling in 2010.”

The 2016 Global Drug Survey results launched on Tuesday, following a survey of 4,500 Australians in collaboration with Guardian Australia about their drug use and experiences. While the figures are not nationally representative, 1.28% of respondents said they had used heroin in the past year, while 7.24% had used heroin in their lifetime. The average age of respondents was 34. According to figures from the latest Household Drugs Survey, which had 23,855 respondents, use of heroin declined in 2013 compared to 2010, from 0.2% to 0.1% of respondents.

Heroin – that scourge and emblem of the 1990s – never really went away. It just hid out for a while, its users ageing, while the moral panic moved elsewhere.

A moral panic acts like a giant spotlight, illuminating the problem. Experts employed, studies commissioned, projects funded, media deployed (like the Four Corners program with hidden cameras showing drugs at music festivals).

But a moral panic warps as well as illuminates – too much heat, not enough light. Countless thousands took ecstasy without a problem but the death of teenager Anna Wood marshalled vast resources and attention to “fighting” the drug in the mid 90s.

Moral panics are not all bad. Money will follow them. Show me a moral panic and I’ll show you wads of cash. It happened with HIV and it happens with some illegal drugs. People get scared – maybe too scared – but things get done. It’s just a matter of whether the right things get done.

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When the last big moral panic over heroin occurred, John Howard was prime minister and unveiled his tough-on-drugs policy. It was actually a lot more sensible than the rhetoric suggested.

Matt Noffs told me that when “Howard launched the tough-on-drugs policy, it was actually a big harm reduction and re-education policy. There was more money for more methadone programs, more syringe exchanges, more treatment as opposed to incarceration. Nowhere else in the world had an injecting centre – except Switzerland; Bob Carr had to be pushed into it but it worked. Between 1998 and 2008 there was a huge reduction in heroin use around Australia.”

But when the spotlight, the money and panic goes away, the drugs are still there. People are still dying in bedrooms and bathrooms, out in the suburbs, under the bridge.

The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre data shows that in 2012, 639 people died from accidental opioid overdose in Australia, with deaths among older users having reached levels higher than the 2001 peak.

About 30% of deaths were heroin-related and 70% were from pharmaceutical opioids.

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The myth that heroin is a young person’s problem is based on the belief that people ‘mature out’ of use by their late 20s. This is belied by the fact that a third of heroin users are aged over 40.

In fact, the average age at death from overdose is in the late 30s, and fewer than 5% of cases are teenagers. What’s more, we’re now seeing overdose fatalities aged in their 50s and 60s.

Australian research from 2013 found overdose deaths among 35-to-44-year-olds had risen sharply in the past few years, as had deaths among 45-to-54-year-olds ... the most common trajectory is for heroin use to commence in the late teens, and to persist through cycles of treatment and relapse for decades. Some give up early, but they represent less than a tenth of those who take up the drug.

The astonishing chronicity of heroin dependence is one of its most outstanding characteristics.

The wagon train of moral panic has moved on but the users are still there, hidden in plain sight.

Noff warns: “We’re going to see the same thing down the track with ice – people who just can’t kick it. We know there’s a group of people who will continue to use it in their 40s.”